Commentary

The average score of all tested siteswas 63, which is better than last month when the average score was 57.

This month sites did a better job on image optimization but scores for gzip compression and caching are still low considering how relatively easy these fixes are.

Effective use of CDN also declined from 28% percent the last month to only 10% this month.

This month’s winner, Seven Hills, is an interesting case because it’s a Single Page Application and is by no means a small site (almost 12MB when fully loaded). Both PageSpeed and WebPagetest are fooled by its intro stage and cannot see the real site loading with all of the other assets like images and videos.

Fail of the month

Dozens of JS files without gzip compression enabled. Dozens of JS files already sounds scary, but things get much worse when gzip is not enabled – you’re transferring 5.5MB of data instead of “just” 1.2MB.

Next month

It will be interesting to watch the rise of SPAs and check if performance test tools are able to deal with its specifics. If not we will have to consider changing our test methodology for this type of page.

How we test

Google PageSpeed Insights

We test each website home page with Google PageSpeed Insights and count the average score from the Mobile and Desktop results.

WebPagetest

We test each website home page with WebPagetest and calculate the score from the result grades as follows:

A – 100

B – 80

C – 60

D – 40

F – 0

Effective use of CDN criteria is either Yes (100) or X (No – 0).

Total Score

The total score is calculated as an average from the Google PageSpeed Insights score and the WebPagetest score. The maximum score any site can get is 100.

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About the author

Lubos Kmetko started to work for Xfive (formerly XHTMLized) as a front-end developer in 2006. He currently helps with business operations and writes for the Xfive blog.